Now you have the opportunity to listen to the recordings of Sorley MacLean. I hope you will find that it brings to life the poetry that you have looked at on the page, and that it helps you to grasp some of the differences between Gaelic and English that affect MacLean's translation of his own work, as well as elucidating particular references that may have puzzled you. Perhaps the best plan, if you have time, will be to listen to each section once, and then go through them again, stopping an

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The relationship between the Enlightenment and the movement known as Romanticism, which dominated early nineteenth-century culture, is the subject of intense debate among scholars. There is no single correct way of defining this relationship, and one of the main challenges you will face in this course is in forming your own conclusions on the subject. It is possible, for example, to see the French Revolution as a cataclysmic event that tumbled the old order and ruptured faith in the Enlighten

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Just as with other natural phenomena, Enlightenment thinkers came to the conclusion as a result of observation that human nature itself was a basic constant. In other words, it possessed common characteristics and was subject to universal, verifiable laws of cause and effect. As Hume put it:

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Author(s): The Open University

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You will find in this unit in one form or another the pervasive influence of the Enlightenment. Sometimes this influence is buried in deeply ambiguous texts such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's (1756–91) opera Don Giovanni (1787), which includes a famous toast to ‘liberty’. The opera is seen by some as an attempt to subject to critical scrutiny the behaviour of at least one member of a corrupt eighteenth-century aristocracy and the social or class structure that facilitated h

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Near- or half rhymes are words or combinations of words that achieve only a partial rhyme. Half rhymes can be between words with just one syllable, or between parts of words, for example where the accented syllables rhyme with each other, but other syllables in the word don't rhyme. For instance: cover–shovel; wily–piling, calling–fallen; wildebeest–building.

Assonant rhyme refers to echoing vowel sounds, eith

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But, you may be thinking, all our agreement up to now has shown that these perceptions and assumptions come from a common understanding of the appropriate form and meaning of a war memorial. Where, might you ask, does personal response come in? Are we not individuals who have different ways of looking at artefacts and of deciding what – if anything – they mean? This question opens up a big area of discussion, one which will be taken up many times later.

Clearly, as individuals, we m

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the deployment of ‘Chinese’ motifs within interior decor, popular from the early eighteenth century onwards. The most widespread example of this is the so-called ‘willow pattern’ used on domestic china which persists to this day.

Clerestory:

an upper part of a wall carried on arcades, and pierced with windows to allow light to penetrate.

Coffering:

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In 1800, having divorced Mrs Fitzherbert and contracted a disastrous marriage with Princess Caroline of Brunswick, forced on him by the necessity of persuading the king to clear his vast debts, the Prince of Wales fled back to Brighton with his court. In 1801 he whiled away his time (and squandered Caroline's dowry) dreaming up extensions and changes to the interior decor of the Pavilion.

Of these, certainly the most interesting and prophetic was his development of the interior into a C

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This unit has laid the groundwork for a study of consciousness. We have identified the phenomenon in which we are interested, looked at some of its mysterious features and considered the problems it poses. You may have been wondering exactly what philosophers have to contribute here. Isn't explaining consciousness a matter for scientists – requiring the formation and testing of empirical hypotheses, not conceptual analysis and a priori reasoning? There are at least three aspects to the answ

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There is a widespread commitment among contemporary philosophers and scientists to a naturalistic view of the world. In broad terms, naturalism is the view that everything is scientifically explicable – to put it crudely, that there are no miracles. (Note that I am using ‘naturalism’ here for a metaphysical position – a view about the nature of the world. It is also used for a methodological position – a view about how the world, or some aspect of it, should be

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One of the most impressive but puzzling capacities we have is the ability to represent the world around us, both in talking about it among ourselves and in thinking about it as individuals. When someone utters the sentence, ‘The German economy is bouncing back’, for example, they are able to convey to their audience something about the German economy. Their utterance may be correct or it may be incorrect, but either way it is making a claim about how things are, and in this loose but intu

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The health of mothers and infants was one target for action. France was among the first to introduce infant welfare schemes, as low birth rates, high infant mortality and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led politicians to fear for the future strength of the nation. Diarrhoea among bottle-fed babies was singled out as a preventable cause of high infant mortality. From the 1890s, charities and local authorities set up infant welfare clinics called gouttes de lait, which encouraged moth

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Owen's partnership of 1814, consisting of Bentham and other enlightened individuals, mainly wealthy Quakers, paved the way for the rapid implementation of the innovations spelled out in the Statement of 1812 and subsequently in the essays. Two of the partners, William Allen (1770–1843), a chemist and businessman, and the wealthy and philanthropic John Walker (1767–1824), Owen's closest associate, were interested in education and had encouraged the establishment of schools adopting

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